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Live Tweeting Your Own Events

May 24, 2011

At last month’s New Models in Collaboration convening, we realized we wanted to live tweet from the event. However, we’ve never – as an organization – done this before, so we had to work out logistics on the fly. Especially since our Communications staff is also part of the training team and thus running event support throughout the day.

Questions we found ourselves asking, before, during, and after the event:

What is our goal/reason to be tweeting this event?

How many staff do we have who are able — and available — to tweet? What training might they need first?

What content do we want to prioritize?

How long is reasonable for a staff person to be on tweet duty at a full-day event? What sort of rotation do we need to put in place to give someone a break?

How do we handle the breakout sessions – especially when there are more workshops than there are people available to tweet? (@npc_life was leading one of the sessions)

How do we juggle event support (“Help! The microphones just lost power!”) with focusing on content enough to glean tweetable content?

Do we need a hashtag? If so, what is the best way(s) to get it (#npcollab) out to people?

Some of these questions we were able to answer, some we had to guess at in the moment and try to improve next time, and some we never resolved. Developing our policies is definitely a work in progress.

How does your organization deal with live tweeting while also hosting/organizing an event?